biotechnology

As Mixael Laufer tells it, the vision came to him in El Salvador. Laufer was visiting Central America as a human rights envoy, touring a tiny, rural mountain town with the Marin County Peace and Justice Coalition. When he arrived at the town’s medical clinic, it had just run out of birth control. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a country where there are there are methamphetamine and ecstasy labs everywhere. Birth control isn’t that much more complicated,’” Laufer told Gizmodo. “‘Why aren’t these people just making their own birth control?’”...

[...] At a time when some regulatory bodies and biopharma companies are increasing their transparency initiatives involving access to clinical-trial data, disclosing trial results to volunteers could also go a long way toward strengthening public confidence. Read More »

Open source biotechnology, through which biotechnology inventions are made freely available for others to use and improve upon, could help developing countries overcome hurdles created by stringent intellectual property rights (IPRs), a study says. Read More »

Drew Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. Read More »

One of the most valuable research tools is a model of the type of problem you are trying to solve. This allows for study of the problem mechanism and allows attempts at solving various parts of the problem without disrupting an actual patient or when such is unavailable... Read More »

SIGNL, a service that tracks the fastest-growing companies worldwide, ranked Clinovo at 9th position among 494 companies in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology industry. From startups to big businesses, SIGNL measures the success of a company’s engine by aggregating and quantifying evidence of a business growth. Read More »

The unfolding tragedy in the Bahamas demonstrates that the 21st century will be marked by increasingly frequent, often catastrophic disasters of unprecedented scope and scale. Yet again, the unprecedented challenges of disaster management are being met with mostly conventional, labor-intensive, costly, and often inadequately slow response efforts. These 21st-century threats, particularly those that affect livelihood, health, and well-being, deserve the application of 21st-century technologies. Read More »

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, Santa Clara County StartUp Cup held their event finals. From a pool of more than 50 applicants, three were recognized for their businesses models. The first place winner was Open Medicine Institute. Read More »

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., announced today that Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Microbial Biotechnology have joined the Wiley Open Access publishing program. All articles in these two journals are now open access and free to view, download and share. Read More »

It is salubrious to stretch oneself and regularly attend a conference in a related field. At the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, one can bask in the wisdom of experts who are truly interdisciplinary (as opposed to people like me, who is simply undisciplined). Their Tenth Anniversary Conference drew about 120 participants. The many topics–which included effects of the Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care Act and other cases, reasons that accountable care and other efforts haven’t lowered costs, stresses on the pharmaceutical industry, and directions in FDA regulation–contained several insights for health IT professionals...

Health care merger and acquisition activity strengthened in the second quarter of 2013. Deal volume was up 10% versus the previous quarter, with 223 deals announced. However, the quarter underperformed (-15%) in comparison with the same quarter a year ago, according to The Health Care M&A Report. [...] Read More »

At some point in June this year, the total amount given as grants to food and agriculture projects by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation surpassed the US$3 billion mark. It marked quite a milestone. From nowhere on the agricultural scene less than a decade ago, the Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the world's major donors to agricultural research and development...